This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Donovan Woods’ country road, from Sarnia to Nashville

Donovan Woods is a low-key dude from Sarnia with a self-deprecating sense of humour, an unfussy demeanour perhaps best described as “rumpled everyman” and not a shred of the “hustler” about him, so watching him gradually weasel his way into Nashville’s inner songwriting circle over the past few years has been a proper delight.

Of course, Woods must be able to hustle when he has to or he wouldn’t have made it this far. But his is an honest, incremental success story based purely on the strength of his work, on making records that have dug their hooks deeply into the people who have heard them and then passed, friend to friend to friend, up the chain until the decision makers at the top wound up paying attention.

After four quiet, intimately universal indie albums released the past decade to ever widening acclaim and cultish adoration at home in Canada, including this year’s Polaris Music Prize long-listed Hard Settle, Ain’t Troubled, Woods finally made concrete hay of some tentative first forays into the Nashville songwriting scene — Tim McGraw included the aching “Portland, Maine” on his 2014 album, Sundown Heaven Town, for instance — by signing a deal with Warner-Chappell Publishing Nashville in May.

That’s a rare feat for a Canadian in a music city historically distrustful of interlopers; Warner-Chappell has signed nine to date, as far as Woods knows, “and one of them was Shania Twain.” Now he goes to work in a building that proudly displays photos of the publishing behemoth’s many esteemed employees over the years, from Willie Nelson to Kacey Musgraves, one week a month to co-write with whomever his advocates in Nashville coerce into showing up.

“I feel like I’ve weaseled my way into everything. I feel like I snuck my way into being an actual Canadian artist,” Woods concedes humbly over a pint on Bloor Street this week in advance of his Friday date for the Massey Hall Presents series at Trinity-St. Paul’s church. “But yeah, it’s a job. It’s f---in’ rad. The connections are huge. I can write with whoever I want to.

Article Continued Below

“This tour will likely break even, but that’s totally fine. It’s great. This just pays me to write. It’s the job I literally dreamed about. And nobody bugs me when I’m there. Nobody even talks to me. I have a room that I can book, I have a parking space in the building. But nobody calls me or bugs me. They’re just, like, ‘I’m sure he’s writing songs’ or whatever. It’s the dreamiest.”

Toronto singer/songwriter Donovan Woods has become that rare Canadian to worm his way into the Nashville songwriting "establishment." (Mark Maryanovich)

Granted, some of Woods’ sessions involve toiling away over a song while some hotsy-totsy “buzz” act looking for a 25-percent co-writing cut to satisfy the label plucks away disinterestedly at a laptop in the corner. But that’s what pays the bills, and Woods is suddenly able to record and to tour under his own name far more than he was formerly able. As the title of his 2013 LP put it, Don’t Get Too Grand.

“I just look at the calendar and see who I’m writing with and I go there and I write, like, five songs a week and that’s it, really,” he says. “It’s super fun. Sometimes you write and you go, ‘I’m keeping this,’ but Warner-Chappell’s not interested in what I’m doing. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m putting out an EP’ and they’re like, ‘Have a good time.’ They’re not interested in what I’m doing really. They want me to write for other people.

“I try not to be too precious about it. I feel like the recipe for disaster is to feel like a song is really good and you’ll never write another good song. I feel like you should be able to say: ‘Sure, take it. Bye.’ And then there’ll be another song and another song. I’m constantly guarding against that.”

Woods just followed up Hard Settle, Ain’t Troubled — a painful but poised breakup album whose songs “aren’t all stories about me,” the recent divorcee contends, “although a lot of them are” — with a marginally more “lighthearted” (his word), instrumentally fleshier EP titled They Are Going Away that confidently continues to move away from the cloistered Paul Simon-meets-Elliott Smith acoustic intimacy of his earlier output.

He agrees with the observation that Hard Settle and They Are Going Away — whose first single is a co-write with Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley called “What They Mean” — signal a new phase in his recording career, crediting former Ohbijou member-turned-producer James Bunton with getting him where he wants to be.

“It’s just him. It’s having someone to organize getting those people and what it’s going to sound like. I just can’t do that stuff. And I don’t have the musical vocabulary to do it,” he says. “But I wanted it to sound like that. I wanted it to sound super-dark and still gritty — have the centre of it still be voice and guitar — but have colours and kind of make sure it’s broader and indicative of a bigger show. Hopefully.”

Meantime, Woods is pleased to see his audience broadening towards those bigger shows in unlikely directions.

“I played in Peterborough last night and the new thing I get is, like, pretty tough guys who wanna talk — they’re having feelings and they wanna talk,” he says. “It’s really gratifying if I’m creating some sort of internal life for them. Like farmers, dudes who look like the guys I grew up with and who I would be if I still lived in Sarnia. I love it. It’s nice to have that type of fan. That people give a sh-- is just the funnest.”

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com